When every dollar counts – savings for non-profits

When every dollar counts. A customer-centric solution for non-profit organisations

Our customer, a well-known non-profit organisation, had been running a donor acquisition program for two years. Results had been strong, with campaign response rates averaging over 9%. As is so often the case, while things were going well, no-one asked why, or looked for ways of making improvements.

After two years, however, campaign profitability gradually began to decline, but the CRM system used did not allow marketers to look at any donor profiling or understand which donor segments were more or less valuable to the organisation.

When external prospecting lists were used in acquisition campaigns, the CRM offered no reliable way of knowing which potential donors had already been contacted, let alone how often and how recently. Multiple mail packs were sent to people in a short space of time, causing damage to the brand and wasting critical funds. Highly emotional complaints from the public were passed up to the CEO. The marketing team needed help.

How Marketsoft helped

Marketsoft worked closely with the marketing team over the first few campaigns to understand why these issues were arising. With advanced insights combined with over twenty years of experience with non-profit data, we worked in partnership to establish a next practice solution.

✓ Marketsoft then implemented a centralised marketing data hub to organise and store all customer profile, campaign history and customer preference data from the past five years.

✓ A single customer view of prospects and donors was put in place using Marketsoft’s sophisticated ‘fuzzy’ matching, enabling marketers to have an accurate view of donor history and understand the impacts of recency and frequency of contact.

Outcomes – the customer success story

✓ The decline in results was reversed, with resources focussed on the most valuable donor segments and chronic non-responders suppressed from campaigns. Better marketing decisions could be made thanks to easy access to customer data reporting.

✓ The successful results of acquisition campaigns were clearly visible. The marketing team was able to communicate these results and the reasons supporting future initiatives to obtain the support of stakeholders.